When Humbert declares himself an artist, he reveals his attempt to impose a sense of meaningful structure on his more basic instincts. In chronicling his life with Lolita, he strives to create a work of art that will make both of them immortal. He does this by highlighting his aesthetic admiration of Lolita's beauty while simultaneously concealing his morally reprehensible actions against her. However, he often fails in this endeavor, as seen when he imagines himself as a painter, capturing the sorrow and heartbreak that define his relationship with Lolita. He envisions his murals illustrating:

a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower.... There would have been a sultan, his face showing deep agony (masked, as it were, by his gentle caress), aiding a callipygian slave child to ascend a column of onyx. There would have been those glowing orbs of gonadal luminescence that travel up the opalescent sides of jukeboxes. There would have been all sorts of camp activities for the intermediate group, Canoeing, Carousing, Combing Curls under the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a final pulse, a last splash of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

At other moments, he turns to art as a means to ease his guilt: "Unless it can be proven to me ... that in the grand scheme it does not matter at all that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had her childhood stolen by a lunatic, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see no remedy for my suffering but the melancholic and very specific relief of eloquent art."

Humbert's struggle to produce art is intertwined with another crucial theme—appearance versus reality—as he tries to craft an idealized portrayal of Lolita and his relationship with her. He consistently emphasizes Lolita's innocence, which is central to his view of her and, consequently, his attraction to her. He asserts that "under no circumstances would [he] have interfered with the innocence of a child." Yet, she was never as innocent as he imagined. At camp, she engaged in sexual activities and was bold enough to seduce Humbert on their first night together. Later, as a response to his control over her, she turns into a "cruel manipulator," demanding money in exchange for sexual favors.

At the same time, Lolita was more vulnerable than Humbert was willing to admit, and he took advantage of that vulnerability, such as when he comforted her after her mother's death. He symbolically reflects on how he destroyed her innocence, admitting that "our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep."

Humbert perceives himself as both a victim and a perpetrator in his relationship with Lolita. He admits to subjecting her to a "singular and bestial cohabitation" and recognizes that "even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif." Despite this, he also considers himself a victim of his uncontrollable obsession with her, which he describes in detail.

Humbert's intense self-hatred compels him to invent an alter ego who can absolve him of his guilt. Clare Quilty represents the manifestation of his forbidden...